We keep banging on about the Nokia N8 with almost misty-eyed affection because it was a great device and some fantastic mobile films were made on it.

Those were the days when the Nokia N8 camera phone impressed with its 8MP camera – the original iPhone 4 packed only five mega-pixels – and for filming on a cameraphone at least, it put the Apple model in the shade.

But the former Finnish giant refuses to roll over and is back in the market with the new Nokia Lumia 1020 running Windows Phone software and featuring an eye-watering 41MP camera – and a £600 price tag to match.

The technology now added to the 1020 made its debut in the 808 Pureview in July 2012, unfortunately the 808 was the Finnish company’s final Symbian phone.

So far reviews for the 1020 have been positive, certainly regarding the capabilities of its “fantastic” camera, and we roundup a bunch here:

“Full HD video (at 24, 25 or 30fps) looks lovely, and the stereo audio recording is well above par. Another photo favourite is the decent xenon flash – far superior to weedy LED lights. It’s good out to a couple of metres. Suffice it to say, this is a camera that wipes the floor with all smartphone rivals,” says Stuff.

Of course the higher the quality, the more disk space you’ll eat on the device – and as with previous Lumias, there’s no SD slot. The phone comes in 32GB and 64GB flavours. However, it does come with 7GB of space on SkyDrive,Microsoft‘s equivalent to Dropbox, which integrates tightly with all Windows Phone handsets. (Guardian)

“With 41MP resolution, the 1020 camera has twice as many pixels as its nearest competitors. Three times as many if you want optical image stabilization. And the sensor is four times as big as most smartphone sensors and more than twice as big as the second-biggest sensor. The 808 PureView had a bigger sensor, but it has since retired and it didn’t have the stabilization and bright aperture to begin with. (gsmarena.com).

For photographers the 1020 has been compared with a powerful compact camera.

“Its new default camera app is Nokia ProCam, which offers shutter speed, white balance, sensitivity and focus adjustment on pop-up dials, and a bona fide full auto mode. In normal shooting, the app stores photos as a 5MP snap plus a full resolution JPEG version – either 34MP or 38MP, depending on whether you’ve chosen widescreen or 4:3 image ratio,” says the Stuff reviewer.

The hardware isn’t much different, either: the heart of the 1020 is the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.5GHz processor, though the 1020 gets a boost to 2GB of RAM.

The specifications for the 1020 show that it is slightly lighter than the 920 (158g against the 920′s 185g). Its 1020 camera stands proud of the back, so it can’t lie flat, but it still feels less of a slab than its predecessor (although the 925 is a much slimmer and lighter phone, weighing in at 139g. For comparison, the iPhone 5S weighs 112g; HTC One, 130g; Samsung Galaxy S4 130g; BlackBerry Z10, 137.5g.).

The 1020 is made of a matte polycarbonate, which is a little more subtle than the glossy polycarbonate of the 920 – though the best looker of the Lumia handsets remains the brushed aluminium of the 925. Colourwise, you get a choice of radioactive custard-yellow, or a more sober black or white.

For those planning to use the camera more than casually, consider getting the camera grip, which makes it feel, well, more like a camera. It adds weight and bulk, but crucially it also adds an extra battery: snapping away will drain the battery surprisingly quickly.